Cover of I Shock Myself: The Autobiography of Beatrice Wood

I Shock Myself: The Autobiography of Beatrice Wood

"Beatrice Wood's Life has been extraordinary in every way, from earliest childhood, when her dominating Victorian mother realized she "wasn't like the rest of them," to her productive life at ninety-five in California's Ojiai Valley. Rebellious, radical and romantic, Beatrice Wood was determined to be an artist. She fled to Paris for several bohemian seasons as a painter and actress, then returned to New York where she fell into the loving clutches of two Frenchmen: Henri-Pierre Roche, the author of Jules and Jim, and Marcel Duchamp, the iconoclastic Dadaist. Her promising youth was followed by a disastrous marriage, financial woes and a debilitating physical affliction; but in 1933, at the age of forty, she discovered the passion that would change her life: pottery. Now one of America's acclaimed ceramicists, Beatrice Wood shares the intriguing details of her unconventional life in I Shock Myself. With candor and insight, she recollects nearly ten decades of world shaking events, heart breaking romances, and artistic achievement."—Publisher description.

Audience
adult

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked I Shock Myself: The Autobiography of Beatrice Wood? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked I Shock Myself: The Autobiography of Beatrice Wood. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty Shares art, biography, memoir
  2. Life with Picasso Shares art, biography, memoir
  3. The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I Shares art, nonfiction, art history
  4. The Difficulty of Being Shares art, memoir, nonfiction

“People who read I Shock Myself: The Autobiography of Beatrice Wood tend to reach for these next.”

  1. A Girl Like I: An autobiography
  2. Diana Vreeland
  3. Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes
  4. Down Below

“If you want more of the same (biography about art), start with these.”

  1. Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright
  2. Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life
  3. Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe
  4. Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life

“If it was the art that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. Art Lover: A Biography of Peggy Guggenheim
  2. The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon: The Authorized Biography
  3. David Hockney: The Biography, 1937-1975
  4. Van Gogh: His Life and His Art

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. The Leaving of Things
  2. A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley
  3. Modern Love: The Lives of John and Sunday Reed
  4. All Tomorrow's Parties: A Memoir